Brandon Parker is walking through his Cherry Hill neighborhood on a Sunday morning. In his right hand is a cigarette. In his left, a bag of groceries from the Family Dollar Store. Behind him, his 3-year-old son, Rainier, reaches into the bag of Doritos his daughter Na-ayzin, 4, is holding.

“That’s all they ever ask for, soda and chips,” Parker said. “I just bought them breakfast and that’s what they wanted, chips.”

Parker said he would prefer to feed them fresh fruit. He buys organic fruit from the Fresh Food Mart off Patapsco Avenue when he can. But it is early and his kids are hungry. The Family Dollar is within walking distance, so they go there, not for any other reason than because it is close.

Parker lives in a what’s commonly called a “food desert,” a neighborhood with little access to affordable and healthy food. About 111,600 Baltimore residents — close to 18 percent of the city’s population — making less than $25,000 a year live more than a quarter of a mile from a store selling fresh produce. They often pay more at corner stores or forgo fresh food altogether, adding to an already high rate of obesity, diabetes and heart disease among the city’s poor.

A year after hiring Holly Freishtat as its food policy director, the city is starting to change its tactics in tackling such food deserts. It’s shifting its focus away from luring supermarkets to the city, and instead hopes to expand a virtual supermarket program.

Baltimore has plans to make 30 acres of urban farm land available for five inner-city farmers and is even partnering with the region’s biggest charity, United Way of Central Maryland, to produce 1.5 million pounds of food for 60,000 area residents in the next year.

The goal is getting food to the people, even if they can’t get people to the supermarket, Freishtat said.

“What we’re seeing here is that the whole food environment is changing,” she said.

Luring retailers

Seven years is a long time to wait for fresh produce. That’s how long residents of Howard Park had to wait before a ShopRite broke ground in their neighborhood this September. The store at the 4600 block of Liberty Heights Avenue will take up 5.6 acres and plans to open in 2013.

Not every neighborhood is going to get a ShopRite, though. For every Howard Park, there are two or three neighborhoods like Cherry Hill where the last fresh-food supermarket pulled out five years ago.

Bringing a ShopRite-sized store to most food deserts is unrealistic, said Jeremy Diamond, a food industry consultant in Pikesville. He said most larger chains typically want at least 60,000 square feet when opening a new store in the city. The large space allows them to buy in bulk and sell at lower prices.

“If you do see a 60,000-square-foot store in a food desert, that’s a rarity,” said Diamond, director of the Diamond Group. “That’s not the norm.”

Cathy B. McClain, executive director of the nonprofit Cherry Hill Trust, has tried bringing large supermarkets to Cherry Hill in the past. The problem is, the space isn’t there.

“He would have to take the entire [Cherry Hill] shopping center to have that kind of square footage,” said McClain, whose group is affiliated with Catholic Charities of Baltimore. “And that would put other businesses that are new within the neighborhood out of business.”

Larger chains also have to worry about losing business to speciality stores, said Jeff Metzger, publisher of Food World Magazine in Columbia. Independent stores make up close to a quarter of Baltimore’s $1.2 billion food and drug business, Metzger said. That number is above the national average and poses a problem for potential national chains looking to open stores in the city.

“It comes down to simple demographics,” Metzger said. “What is the potential spending capability of the consumer demographics there?”

One solution for Baltimore neighborhoods would be to court those smaller, independent grocers. These stores typically need about 30,000 square feet and can usually fit in established buildings.

Independent grocers, though, usually face high wholesale prices.

Robert N. Santoni Jr. is lucky. His store, Santoni’s Super Market, has a large enough footprint in East Baltimore that it can join about 100 other stores in buying groceries from SuperValu as a group.

Those who can’t buy wholesale in a group are often faced with two options: market unhealthy food they know will sell, like chips and soda, or risk going out of business.

“Any national chain or regional chain could build a store,” said Santoni, CFO of Santoni’s. “But it’s not going to be profitable. So that keeps them away.”

The two work for the Baltimore Food Co-op, which opened this summer in the city’s Remington neighborhood. The goal of the membership-owned co-op is to give residents access to mostly locally grown food at reasonable prices. Wells said he saw an opportunity to fill a void and offer an alternative to convenience stores and supermarkets.

“The whole thing about food deserts is it’s not that people can’t get the food,” Wells said, “it’s what kind of food can they get.”

Changing eating habits

The city currently has a handful of initiatives in the works to negate the effects of supermarkets pulling out of low-income neighborhoods.

Among those initiatives is the city’s virtual supermarkets program, which allows residents to order food online from Santoni’s. Residents can pick up and pay for their groceries at one of four locations.

Laura Fox, coordinator of the virtual supermarket project, said the city’s health department is trying to raise $200,000 to expand the program into new locations in public housing complexes and senior centers. Fox said the department wants to expand around three or four existing locations in East Baltimore, as well as in the Cherry Hill Senior Manor and in Pigtown.

Fox said she hopes to get other independent grocers to join Santoni’s in delivering foods to Baltimore’s food deserts. One hundred and sixty people regularly use the program, she said, resulting in the purchase of about $26,000 worth of groceries since it launched.

“At a certain number of orders, it really does pay for itself,” Fox said.

The health department is also launching a healthy-eating initiative in some of the city’s public markets to take on the Catch-22 of the food desert issue. Some question whether demand for fresh fruit and vegetables is strong enough to make doing business in some neighborhoods worth it.

Lexington Market already has received a $42,000 grant from the Lexington Markets Corp. as part of the Healthy Food Hub program. By 2012, 10 vendors at the West Baltimore market will feature pictures of green leaves on their menus indicating healthy items.

Freishtat hopes to expand the program to another 20 vendors in Lexington Market, eventually bringing the program to Hollins and Northeast markets. The goal is to convince vendors they can make money selling healthy food.

Chill M. Kim can’t, though. At least not right now. Kim is the manager of Sandwich King at Lexington Market, one of the few non-fruit vendors offering a healthy option on its menu. The Sandwich King prominently advertises a turkey burger, yet Kim said he sells only one or two turkey burgers a week.

“This is Lexington Market,” Kim said. “I would say out of 100 people here, 99 people are used to regular hamburgers.”

Sou Chu Kim knows the feeling. Kim is the manager of Sam’s Grocery in Federal Hill, a small store on the corner of Randall and Charles streets. Her customers usually head to the Shoppers grocery store down the road if they are looking for vegetables, leaving Kim selling mostly snacks and junk food.

Kim said she used to buy small amounts of lettuce and tomatoes for her store, but few people bought them.

“I’d always throw them away,” Kim said. “So it wasn’t worth it.”

If any store could sell fresh fruit and vegetables, it should be Reedbird Deli and Market in Cherry Hill. The corner store stands on the periphery of the Cherry Hill food desert, less than half a mile away from where Parker’s kids devoured that bag of breakfast chips. If stocked with fresh fruit and vegetables, the thinking goes, the Reedbird Deli and Market could be a potential oasis in the desert.

But fresh fruit and vegetables don’t sell, store manager Santos Nolasco said. Like Kim, Nolasco was the one eating the cost when his fruit would spoil.

When asked if there was a demand for fruit in his store, Nolasco shook his head.